In April of this year, legendary Mad-magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee passed away at age 102. As editor of Mad, I worked with Jaffee for more than 38 years. Unfortunately, illness prevented me from taking part in his memorial in September. Had I been able to attend, this is what I would have said.
An old Jewish man retires. And within days, he realizes it was a big mistake. He’s bored and depressed. His wife says, “Why don’t you go out and get another job?” And that’s exactly what the old man does. He gets a job—as a men’s-room attendant—at New York City’s Port Authority terminal.
First day, his wife is anxiously waiting for him when he comes home.
“So, how did it go?”
“Oy, don’t ask. It was horrible.”
“Why, what happened?”
“At 7 A.M. all the ladies of the evening came in, some still with their customers. You shouldn’t know of such things!
“At 8 A.M., all the drunks came in to take baths in the sinks. It was disgusting!
“Then at 9 A.M., all the drug dealers came in to meet with their customers. You really shouldn’t know of such things!
“At 11:30, a man came in to have a bowel movement. It was like a breath of fresh air!”
That was one of Al Jaffee’s favorite jokes. I remember him coming into my office like a giddy schoolyard boy. He knew we shared a love of jokes, and he couldn’t wait to tell it to me. And he told it really well. It turns out Al Jaffee could do a really good old Jewish man. Go figure. Who knew?
I’ve been thinking about that joke and why Al loved it, besides the fact that it’s about a little old Jewish man.
Well, it’s a little bit naughty … O.K. … borderline bad taste. But if you tell it just right, with a rascally twinkle in your eye, you can make it funny—very funny. Throughout his life, Al Jaffee always had a rascally twinkle in his eye, and in his work. Al Jaffee was a very, very funny man.
I once asked Al to do a small piece of spot art to accompany an article about how movie theaters were dying because no one was going to them anymore. I needed it overnight, so I wasn’t expecting much. I just needed to fill a space in the article’s layout.
As he did for almost every Mad job he ever did for me, Al, who was only in his late 70s at the time, walked from his apartment on Lexington Avenue, all the way across town to the Mad offices on Broadway, to hand-deliver the art.
He drew a bird’s-eye view of a massive parking lot. Acres and acres. In the center was a deserted movie theater. And in this enormous parking lot there were but two cars.
Well, it’s a little bit naughty … O.K. … borderline bad taste.
And, of course, in Al’s illustration, the two cars had just crashed into each other.
Al was incapable of phoning it in. He instinctively had to put his subversive twist on everything he did, no matter how big or small the job.
It should come as no surprise that the man who invented Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions could be devastating and fast with his wit.
We once were on a Mad staff trip to Zermatt. Switzerland. The first day, a bunch of us decided to take one of those giant cable cars up the mountain. Jaffee was there, along with another Mad artist, Don Edwing, who insisted we call him by his pen name, Duck Edwing.
Now, Duck Edwing was like a comedy Gatling gun, firing off one-liner after one-liner at a rapid pace. Some were hilarious, some less so, some just flat-out sucked. It never deterred him. The one-liners just kept coming.
Al and I filed into the cable car with other Mad contributors and a few random tourists, about 20 people in all.
At the precise second the cable car’s doors slammed shut, from the back of the car came Duck Edwing’s voice, in his best Eastern European villain’s accent, “So … we meet again … MR. BOND!!!”
His timing was impeccable, and everyone in the car broke up.
The man who invented Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions could be devastating and fast with his wit.
On the way down, the doors slammed shut, and once again Edwing’s voice filled the car. “So … we meet again … MR. BOND!!!” Again, everyone laughed, but maybe not as heartily as the first time.
Over the next few days, every time we entered a cable car, we knew what was coming when the doors shut. We gritted our teeth, covered our ears, face-palmed our heads. None of this deterred Duck Edwing. “So … we meet again … MR. BOND!”
Around day four, Al had had enough. Shaking his head as we exited the car, Al turned to me and said, “I just realized. Duck Edwing is a verb!”
It was classic Jaffee.
Al is probably most famous for the Mad Fold-In, the inside back cover of the magazine, on which there is a giant illustration, and a question is posed. Several answers are possible. But when you fold in the page, not only is a satirical misdirected answer revealed, but an entirely new illustration is created to accompany it.
When Nick Meglin and I took over as co-editors in 1985, Al was a mere 65 or, put another way, almost at the midpoint of his career. We volunteered to take over writing the Fold-In to lighten some of Al’s workload. A typical Fold-In came together something like this. And I’m exaggerating here, but not by much.
After sitting with the staff, sometimes for several days, we would finally come up with some crazy, impossible idea. I’d immediately call Al …
“Mr. Jaffee! I have your next Fold-In idea.”
“Oh, great” he would say in his distinctive baritone voice. “Let me get a pen to write it down.”
“The first illustration is a small-town Fourth of July parade coming down Main Street. High-school marching band, little kids waving flags, dogs, a church with a steeple in the background, and the Seven Dwarfs. Also, an army tank in the rear on fire.”
“When you fold it in, in the second illustration, we see this scene of dystopia. Bleak and barren. The main image is of fracking machinery at work, destroying the planet. Good luck!”
“Well, I don’t know about this one,” he would say. “Let me think about it.”
About an hour later, the fax machine would ring and out of it would come two pages. The first page contained an illustration of a small-town Fourth of July parade, with the marching band, little kids, flags, dogs, church, the Seven Dwarfs, and an army tank ablaze.
On the second page was fracking machinery at work destroying the environment. Only Al somehow managed to also work in a giant skull and crossbones and the logos of three of the largest fracking companies, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Chevron.
I don’t know how the hell he did it, except to say he did it very well for over 40 years, creating over 400 Fold-Ins.
And consider this—he did every one of them without the use of a computer! The first time Al saw his Fold-In folded in was when he got an issue of the magazine in the mail.
In the final years of Mad in New York, whenever Al would stop by to drop off his latest Fold-In, it was like an event. All work would stop, and the entire staff would gather in my office. Everyone, especially the younger members of the staff, knew they were sitting with a legend. They would tell their grandchildren about this one day.
Al would regale us with stories about the early days of Mad and Bill Gaines. Other times he would talk about his career and the artists he knew and worked with—Theodor Geisel, Rube Goldberg, Stan Lee, Charles Schulz, Harvey Kurtzman. Al knew them all. And he outlived them all!
In 2016, the Guinness World Records recognized Al as having “the longest career as a comics artist.” Seventy-three years and three months.
One of Al’s favorite lines, and one I’ve stolen many times, was the one he always used when saying good-bye to someone at a wedding. Shaking their hand, he’d lean in and say, “Well, I just hope the next time we meet it will be under more pleasant circumstances.” I hope the next time we meet it will be under more pleasant circumstances. Until then, it has been my distinct honor to pay tribute to one of the true greats of Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots.”
John Ficarra was the editor of Mad magazine